Pellisworth posted:

karl popper

rudatron posted:

So to take physicalism for example: both physicalist and non-physicalist theories give the same posterior, but your physicalist theories will have a lower prior, so their confidence values are always going to be higher. That's what I mean when I say it 'falls out' of your axiom.

Pellisworth posted:

we have not

I'm sure you mean "stimuli." Lightning does not produce lipid layers. It may produce triacyglycerols. Cells other than archaea use phospholipid bilayers which are quite a different thing.
I'm sure by "nonorganic carbon materials" you mean carbon dioxide, CO2.

are a myriad
myriad suggests a wide variety of ways that organic materials may be created naturally, could you please list the myriad processes in addition to lightning?

anywhere??

Testable how, where? I don't disagree, but how would I do this experiment or calculation?

You should stop trying to use science as a bludgeon to attack religion when you can't seem to dislodge said club from your rectum.

Pellisworth posted:

are you a markov chain generator

e: too snarky, removed

BrandorKP posted:

Naomi Oreskes talks about this issue:

https://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_oreskes_why_we_should_believe_in_science/transcript?language=en

Leaps of Faith and consensus are very much part of science. And the false dichotomy continues to be harmful.

BrandorKP posted:

Naomi Oreskes talks about this issue:

https://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_oreskes_why_we_should_believe_in_science/transcript?language=en

Leaps of Faith and consensus are very much part of science. And the false dichotomy continues to be harmful.

RasperFat posted:

There isn't definitive proof of microbes yet, but hey look there is physical evidence we can examine and explore more in the future. We can get answers if we keep digging.

You are tossing out this probability argument like it's a kill shot but it's bullshit. Arguing about the probability of life existing elsewhere is based off of models showing what conditions might support and develop life, and looking for how many places might be able to do that. It involves a lot of conjecture, but the at least some of the claims can be tested and could definitely be confirmed if we ever develop interstellar travel.

Arguing about the probability of an afterlife is based off of a binary scenario with no evidence at all, and possibly no way to ever get evidence. There's not a real mathematical probability equation to test it it's plausible, and as of yet seems to have no basis in reality.

Back to being fundamentally wrong, I know Mecca is important for historical reasons, but it's also important for spiritual reasons within the context of Islam. The pilgrimage is part of their faith, as is facing towards Mecca during the daily prayers. Don't pretend that it isn't revered as having spiritual significance because that's just ridiculous.

Buddhists aren't masochists, but suffering was an integral idea of Sidartha's. Detachment removes the source of suffering. That's the path to enlightenment. It's of course far more complex than that, but Buddhism still has mystic aspects that don't reflect reality, such as reincarnation.

I'd be down to know what fascinating implications there are to the fact that souls probably don't exists.

Also I feel sorry that you need some sort of brain scan to know that people love you. Most people know based off of their actions and professed feelings and don't assume people are sociopaths who feign emotions.

I've not been defining religion in any of the absurd ways you've described. Religion and religious faith by requirement have some spiritual element to them, and trying to say anything we are uncertain about is therefore religion or faith is just stupid.


I'll admit abiogenesis is much more complex then that, and we don't have definite proof of ancient life on Mars. It was an oversimplification for someone who doesn't seem to understand the basics of science.

Crowsbeak posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mDuIN5-ww
Yeah Jesus Mysticism really makes you look like a bit of an idiot.

botany posted:

I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice. That evidence was tenuous as poo poo and they threw out half the plates. The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts.

quote:

The production of such an experiment is considered necessary for a particular hypothesis or theory to be considered an established part of the body of scientific knowledge. It is not unusual in the history of science for theories to be developed fully before producing a critical experiment. A given theory which is in accordance with known experiment but which has not yet produced a critical experiment is typically considered worthy of exploration in order to discover such an experimental test.

CommieGIR posted:

Well, the Expedition was more to CONFIRM for the scientific world that the hypothesis held up. They didn't need a lot of plates to confirm, just 2-3 for the lensing to be visible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimentum_crucis

Crowsbeak posted:

I don't get why any atheists like Sam Harris while saying Religion causes people to want to murder Considering western atheism certainly makes Sam Harris want to murder a few million Iranians.

Brainiac Five posted:

What exactly is the evidence against an afterlife which distinguishes "I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe" from "I believe in an afterlife", that is, evidence which is not based on probabilistic claims?

botany posted:

Yeah, and one of the plates they decided on using showed way too much deviation, one showed way too little and one was blurry. And several others who showed values in line with non-relativistic space time were ignored because they didn't fit the expectations. Seriously, the Eddington excursion was a prime example of scientists knowing what conclusion to look for and then creatively interpreting the available data until they supported that conclusion. They happened to be right of course and that's great, but people always hold the eclipse up as a paragon of the scientific method.

botany posted:

I don't really have anything substantial to contribute to the discussion cause y'all talking past each other and misusing words, but I want to just point out that anybody who cites the solar eclipse 1919 and the Eddington expedition as an example for the scientific (hypothetico-deductive) method has very obviously never really looked into how that worked out in practice.

botany posted:

The confirmation of general relativity is actually a really good example for the social nature of consensus building in science as opposed to the impact of cold, hard facts.

CommieGIR posted:

Cingulate posted:

... what's that picture telling us here?..

Pellisworth posted:

The topic of the thread is, "Is the left hostile to religion," and my point is no, it doesn't need to be. Science and religion needn't conflict, and leftism doesn't have to be atheistic. Many interpretations of Christianity have very socialist/leftist economics at the very least.

Bates posted:

Well the answer is "No" in any case. For one thing a majority of leftists are religious and I think even most of the irreligious live their lives quietly and indifferently to religion.

Pellisworth posted:

Could you link an article?

My initial reaction is that "religion" is extremely variable between denominations, regions, etc.

To paint religion by any broad stroke is very reductive.

I can only speak from personal experience, but most of mainstream, non-Evangelical Christianity is pretty cool with science.

CommieGIR posted:

Its showing that the plates were well readable enough from the eclipse to be used against the reference plates taken in January and Febuary by Eddington.

Bates posted:

Well the answer is "No" in any case. For one thing a majority of leftists are religious

CommieGIR posted:

I'm gonna have to disagree, because the plates were viewed by others as well who came to the same conclusions as Eddington.

quote:

And the plates were comparisons of night shots of the stars versus the stars during the eclipse, it was well viewable that the position of the observed stars was dramatically different than during the ecplise, confirming the bending.

quote:

Measurements and photographs were also taken from Brazil that also confirmed the findings during the same eclipse. There was no 'fluke' in being right, the observations played out the claims.

quote:

There was no creative interpretation of the results. That's a claim you need to prove. Even Dyson, who was a skeptic of Einstein's theory, said the resulting plates showed the bend.

Cingulate posted:

I've read Dyson, Eddington & Davidson 1920 (even re-ran the stats myself), I've read The Golem, I've not read Earman & Glymour 1980, I've read a bunch of other papers on the topic, and I think Eddington's and Popper's respective interpretations are entirely defensible.

quote:

That is true I guess, although in the best Kuhnian sense - science is an effectively progressive enterprises even if it is a social, historical phenomenon.

botany posted:

That is certainly not true at the time, where considerable skepticism was the general answer by the commissions who Dyson presented the results to.

No, they confirmed a bending, the problem was that Newtonian mechanics of course predicted a bending. The question was whether Einstein's or Newton's values were right.
That's the Sobral expedition, yes. They used the Sobral 4inch values because those were the ones that most closely gave the right sort of values, even if the Sobral values were considerably larger than what Einstein had predicted.

I am talking about Dyson's interpretations here. He was the principal decision maker.

CommieGIR posted:

http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/2012f/kennefick_phystoday_09.pdf

CommieGIR posted:

Ehhhhhhhhhh....kind of. Leaps of Faith in science still assume an evidentiary result at the end, or are often based on at least some minute level of evidence to begin with. Its not really the same as a 'leap of faith' i.e. a Religious level of faith. If you take a leap of faith in science and get no tangible results at the end and no evidence to support your leap, it was for naught. Sure, you should publish the negative result, but if you were taking the leap without using the scientific method to SUPPORT taking that leap in the first place, people are going to be very wary of your paper. Versus, a leap of faith in the religious sense can be just dismissed regardless of the outcome as 'God works in mysterious ways'.

Its not the same idea of 'Faith'. Its not a religious level of 'Faith', its more of a Hypothesis 'Faith' where you are making guesses based on some findings and testing your hypothesis on faith in the initial evidence. Not 'faith' as in blind belief that religion pushes. Even if you took a 'leap of faith' in science, you'd better have evidence to back at least your starting claims. That's very much counter to the religious idea of 'faith without knowledge'

However, of COURSE science tends to seek a consensus, that's kind of a given.

CommieGIR posted:

botany posted:

CommieGIR posted:

Go read that paper. They said, regardless of any possible bias Eddington might have had, Dyson and Eddington reached the same conclusions that the later re-review of the results of the 1919 Eclipse came to. Its not a fluke, and its generally accepted that enough evidence was gathered to support Einstein's claims. Sorry.

Einstein's theories were still very much up in the air in the general science fields at the time, the proof Eddington and Dyson provided helped solidify backing of Einsteins claims. You don't get to argue that it was just Eddingtons bias playing out when re-review of the evidence says "No, they read it correctly and came to the correct conclusions". That's not chance.

Cingulate posted:

Let me try to write something we can all agree on.

1. Eddington took measurements of a phenomenon which is, as far as we can say today, well explained by General Relativity, and better explained by it than by Newtonian mechanics.
2. At some stages in the analysis of the data, Eddington had to make a decision. The answer was not obviously, perfectly clear - not with mathematical certainty. He had to judge.
3. Eddington was a seemingly honest researcher, and did not intentionally falsify anything, and in the abovementioned judgement, he made a defensible call. As with any judgement, it was made by a human with his own convictions and motivations, which by necessity influence what we do. But this case does not look like fraud or lying.
4. It is possible other decisions would have been justifiable, and that had things been slightly different, he might have made another choice; these decisions could have led to more complicated, indecisive, perhaps even contradictory results.
5. That in this situation they did not is a matter of history - of specific instances of human action that may as well have happened otherwise, not of a universal law that scientists never err or whatever.

Cingulate posted:

Let me try to write something we can all agree on.

1. Eddington took measurements of a phenomenon which is, as far as we can say today, well explained by General Relativity, and better explained by it than by Newtonian mechanics.
2. At some stages in the analysis of the data, Eddington had to make a decision. The answer was not obviously, perfectly clear - not with mathematical certainty. He had to judge.
3. Eddington was a seemingly honest researcher, and did not intentionally falsify anything, and in the abovementioned judgement, he made a defensible call. As with any judgement, it was made by a human with his own convictions and motivations, which by necessity influence what we do. But this case does not look like fraud or lying.
4. It is possible other decisions would have been justifiable, and that had things been slightly different, he might have made another choice; these decisions could have led to more complicated, indecisive, perhaps even contradictory results.
5. That in this situation they did not is a matter of history - of specific instances of human action that may as well have happened otherwise, not of a universal law that scientists never err or whatever.

Brainiac Five posted:

So now that you've admitted you lie and plan to continue lying out of your sheer contempt for someone daring to disagree with you, is there any point in further discussion? I clearly cannot trust anything you write from this point onward to be honest.

You also seem to not understand what proof is. You cannot prove anything much about the state of another person's mind. There are limits to absolute knowledge of that. The relative probability of something does not constitute proof of its existence, as the case of black swans should show handily. For someone sneering about how other people don't understand science, you don't seem to have a good grasp on what can and cannot be proven.

Cingulate posted:

In the US.

What does it look like across nations? Globally, or at least within the west?

CommieGIR posted:

Pretty much, minus the /r/athiest types and the Dawkins/Hitchens types.

Bates posted:

Sure and minus far right evangelical sects and the Pat Robertsons Christians are not hostile to homosexuals. All groups have loud and obnoxious subsets with bad and wrong opinions.

RasperFat posted:

Holy poo poo you're insufferable. You never engage any actual arguments I'm making. Why am I a liar? Because I got a detail wrong on something?

It seems to be growing more obvious your aren't arguing in good faith. How about you stop saying inflammatory personal poo poo and instead argue against what I said.

We have "hints" there might have been life on Mars. We have potential ways for organic materials to be made from nature. This isn't some random poo poo that might exist based off of nothings.

What the gently caress do black swans have to do with the existence of the supernatural? When have I sneered at you? Why do you think we can never prove state of mind?

You seem terrified to engage even the basic level of my arguments. You take a single phrase and run wild with it, pretend that is the main substance of what you're arguing against, and sit back on a high horse.

Do you have a single loving shred of evidence for an afterlife? Do you have any workable models for how a soul works? Do you even know what kind of evidence even could prove these things?

For someone who sneers at others for daring to call out bullshit , you seem to have no grasp on what plausibility, probability, or evidence is.

Avalerion posted:

Few people would want religion banned even if they might think its rubbish we could do without. Most non religious people don't want religion anywhere near politics but don't mind letting people practice on their own time. Is that hostile?

Avalerion posted:

We probably need to define what being hostile even means in this context. Few people would want religion banned even if they might think its rubbish we could do without. Most non religious people don't want religion anywhere near politics but don't mind letting people practice on their own time. Is that hostile?

CommieGIR posted:

No, and that's all I think most leftists (like me) want: Just Church/State barriers and barriers against Religious Bigotry being legalized as Free Speech in regards to Buisinessses and Law.
'

Cingulate posted:

Well, but do we also hope for a generally more secular society? I think I do. This is not so much a matter of law - nobody here is gonna feel well proposing laws banning any religion, of course - but I think I hope that over time, the general trend of secularization in the West (excluding the US) continues. I'd be happy to see an atheist US president.
So while I can insist something should stay unencumbered by law, I can still hope for it to go away peacefully eventually, and if I do say that, that's more than just saying I want separation of state and church and free speech.

the trump tutelage posted:

Say what you want about Sam Harris, but he (among others) picks this apart pretty well. For Gould's argument to hold, "religion" would need to be qualitatively different than it is today.

Pellisworth posted:

e: just to double triple down, you are describing the very particularly American Evangelical strain of Christianity, and most religious people in the world have extremely different ideas about religion than you're arguing against

Danger posted:

Ironically enough, Harris’s definition of “science” necessarily includes things like astrology, phrenology, and even elements of religion for his tripe about morality to even be taken at face value

CommieGIR posted:

We also cannot afford to burn bridges by attacking religious groups like Dawkins/Hitchens did. There are plenty of religious folk who long for a secular government. We need their support to.

Danger posted:

Ironically enough, Harris’s definition of “science” necessarily includes things like astrology, phrenology, and even elements of religion for his tripe about morality to even be taken at face value.

quote:

The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture. Is the Shroud of Turin a medieval forgery? This is a question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating make it a question of chemistry and physics as well. The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.

The scientific attitude can handle whatever happens to be the case. Indeed, if the evidence for the inerrancy of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus Christ were good, one could embrace the doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity scientifically. The problem, of course, is that the evidence is either terrible or nonexistent—hence the partition we have erected (in practice, never in principle) between science and religion.

CommieGIR posted:

No, and that's all I think most leftists (like me) want: Just Church/State barriers and barriers against Religious Bigotry being legalized as Free Speech in regards to Buisinessses and Law.
'